Tara Music is delighted to announce the release of, ‘Concerning
Of Three Young Men’, the first new studio album of The Voice
Squad in over twenty years.

The Voice Squad are a traditional Irish singing group from Ireland
whose members are Gerry Cullen, Phil Callery and Fran McPhail. Their
names are synonymous with the a cappella close harmony style of
singing, often associated with the British folk tradition, except
that the vast majority of their repertoire is drawn form the unaccompanied
solo singing tradition of Ireland.

The Voice Squad first performed together in 1985 and while the
trio are all renowned traditional singers in their own right it
is when they perform together they create a unique and delightful
sound. This unique sound has carried them from them from the small
smokey folk clubs around Ireland to recording and live performances
with artists such as, The Chieftains, Rita Connolly, Christy Hennessy,
Elvis Costello, Jimmy McCarthy, Sinead O'Connor, Liam O'Flynn, John
Renbourn and Dolores Keane culminating with their appearance, in
front of 80,000 people, at Dublin’s Croke Park for the opening
ceremony of the Special Olympic games in 2003 performing Shaun Davey’s
theme song ‘May We Never Have To Say Goodbye’..

After taking a break from performing as a group they came back
together in 2012 for a small number of concerts but such was their
enjoyment of singing together again and the ecstatic reaction of
audiences that the demand grew for more and more concerts. In 2013
the lads returned to the studio to record their new album ‘Concerning
Of Three Young Men’.

The new album once again emphasizes the group’s Traditional
Irish roots with beautiful versions of classic Irish songs, As I
Roved Out, The Rambling Irishman, The Night Visiting Song (I Must
Away), and The Bonny Light Horseman. With twelve tracks in all,
this album captures the sound that is The Voice Squad.

“The Voice Squad manage what is the most difficult and rare
achievement for any artist. They combine great austerity and restraint
and seriousness with a strange and deeply affecting passionate force.
They approach each song, indeed each chord and note and word and
phrase and pause, not as a way of displaying the singer’s
personality but as a way of exploring and evoking and finding the
actual song’s inner core, the song’s most hidden truth.
In singing, they display an extraordinary talent and technique,
and it should be emphasised that each one of them is a wonderful
singer. But they also have a deep musical intelligence and a rare
tact; they know how much emotion to hold in and how much to release”.
- Colm Tóbin

"The rich sonorities that characterised The Voice Squad in their heyday have further matured in the lengthy intermission since their last album (Good People All) some 21 years ago. The a capella trio have long mined a seam all their own, but the real revelation on this collection are the vastly differing textures they weave: from an American spiritual, Wondrous Love, in all its declamatory glory, to a Baroque, unashamedly bare-boned Courting Is a Pleasure. Claiming Lough Erne Shore for their own, Fran McPhail’s high lonesome opener lures the deeper tones of Gerry Cullen and Phil Callery into the lamentation effortlessly. Here the whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts, The Voice Squad’s harmonies eking subtleties in one another’s interpretations that would most likely be lost in a solo performance. They are, unquestionably, a force still to be reckoned with."Siobhan Long - The Irish Times